47 years old. Ran 4 marathons. PR is 3:06:40 from last week's race at CIM.

Love this Training Log feature at this place and hope the forum will stay as fast as it is now.

Btw, does this place have a blog feature?

Hi calbearsfan! Yes, I think your blog question may get the same here as I gave you there. Pretty sure we don't have it, but what exactly is the feature you mean? (a way to host your blog? Commentary on races? Not sure... )

This is perhaps a better discussion pulled into our Feature Requests forum (scroll down to the bottom of the forum page) rather than this thread, for we do not have this.

But again, I'm still not quite clear what you mean. That's probably because I never used that feature on RWOL. Or if you really mean blogs-by-really-good-runners-and-famous-people that were hosted on RWOL, well, we don't have that either. But we do have damn nice folks and smart runners (just like the sub3 group on RWOL has).

Anyway, the answer is "sorry, no", but eric (the developer/owner, aka The Man) is assuredly listening.

The "blog" here on this running website is your Training Log. It supports extensive commenting that others can read if you make your (B)Log public.

Many of us read other (b)logs both for entertainment and inspiration.

2015 Goals: Chicago Marathon PR

Current Status 04/23: Having a good time running with grumps

aretequest

posted: 12/7/2012 at 7:51 AMmodified: 12/7/2012 at 10:53 AM

Yet another RWOL refugee here. Hope to take another stab at sub 3 in 2013. I have been trying for a few years now (came close with a 3:044 at Boston 2011 edited) but haven't broken through yet. 2012 has been a mixed bag for me. I put in the miles but never found my groove. No PRs for the first time in awhile. I did enjoy some low HR runs, though. Look forward to meeting others in a similiar boat.

Good to see a lot of familiar faces here from RWOL. Just for the record, this will be my "home" for 2013 I think. I'm also slowly importing in my training log and going through it. Some of the data is wonky, such as weather/shoe and the distance is off because it takes the footpod distance which tends to run short so I need to manually change it.

Do people post their weeklies here or just refer the folks to their training calendar?

If anyone feels like they haven't seen enough graphs with heart rate and pace everywhere arete and Greg are your go to guys.

Nice catch.

Yes, I find the HR stuff interesting. Used it quite a bit last year. In the end though, I have to declare my experiment with low HR a bit of a failure. No PRs. Slower 10Ks.

After about 4 years of improvement all my PRs (5Ks, 10Ks, 10M, full) now line up pretty evenly with McMillan (within about 15 seconds)...which leads me a bit mystified where to focus to get to the next level. Lately I have been inclined to return to the sweet spot of LT training. Lots of 10M pace runs and workouts, perhaps with some alternations mixed in there as well as GMP. Even at the expense of slightly lower volume. That is my plan anyhow.

After about 4 years of improvement all my PRs (5Ks, 10Ks, 10M, full) now line up pretty evenly with McMillan (within about 15 seconds)...which leads me a bit mystified where to focus to get to the next level.

So, after my failure in Ottawa at the end of May, I'm going to give it another go next year. I think I'm going to try a bigger and longer base (building from now) and running to or from work. If training goes well, I'm probably going to aim a little faster even than I did this year - I was on pace for 2:55 until 32km, then lost it completely - dead legs, just wouldn't work anymore.

I know I did a bunch of things wrong - starting 5 weeks before the race, my training went downhill for a variety of reasons - schedule, flu, etc.

My ideas for things to change:

Longer and bigger mileage base.

Less of a taper - both length and amount of mileage cut.

Not run the day before, but move that MP run a day earlier and make it shorter.

Better race-day schedule - My breakfast, warm up, travel to start line, etc was not as good as could have been.

Eat a full GU at both stops - they were handing them out twice in the race (I had no idea they did this at big marathons) but I'd never tried one before. I ate about a quarter of it at the first stop in case I had stomache problems - I tried a cliff bar right before a cold-weather ½ and it didn't go well.

less interval work, more MP and tempo work. Maybe a couple more Daniels quality long runs (like the long-tempo-long)

I kind of followed Daniels - his plans are pretty flexible to start with. I don't know if I should still use one of his as a base and work from there or try something completely different. I think I was pretty well prepared until my training went off the rails a little more than a month before the race, so I'm leaning towards just correcting what I think I could have done better.

Hi Calsbear good to see you made it. Im still learning here but the training log is awesome. Start loading your runs in. I loaded in a couple of months worth to get it going and my key races from this year. You can write a race report in your race entry on the log.

Does anyone know if you can load photos with the comments too ?

When you sit back and look at the graphs etc you get a really clear picture of mileage and different training runs leading into races.

Viich - being on pace for 32K and then having dead legs is pretty normal for a rookie marathoner in my experience. This is the proverbial 20 mile wall. This can happen for a variety of reasons, poor pacing, racing beyond your ability, under/over taper, and fueling issues, etc.. Overall though, it was a pretty impressive performance for your first marathon.

FWIW, based on a two minute I didn't see a lot of obvious structure to your training plan, so it is really hard to comment on how to improve it without spending a lot of time looking at it. Since I'm lazy, I would recommend checking out the Pfitz and Hansons training schedules, there have been lots of posts on these recently, and it would probably be more effective to use a canned one such as Pfits 55-70/18wk until you are comfortable with racing the marathon, then start tweaking it.

I don't know where the idea for a 9K marathon pace run a day before the marathon came from, but even two days before a marathon is too close in my opinion. Again, both Pfitz and Hansons schedule have you do this 5 dace before the race and Pfitz recommends two miles at MP race week not almost 6.

Lastly, I would definitely recommend that you practice fueling, most people do more than two energy gels for a marathon. Maybe you can get by on two, but unless you eat 10+, more than that won't hurt.